Occupy AIPAC Advocates Palestinian State, Against Iran Strike

In the world of journalism, attaching the word “gate” to a name has long signaled some conspiracy. Now doing the same with the word “occupy” implies large groups of people hanging around to protest this or that injustice.

It can also be used cleverly to mask a campaign of brazen lies.

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Occupy AIPAC is a weekend long series of events to coincide with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual Policy Conference, going through March 6. The Occupy AIPAC website says the group is gathering in Washington DC for a policy-style summit on the issues of Iran, the Arab Uprising and Palestine and “the affects of AIPAC in determining US foreign policy around those topics.”

The website has a disturbingly loose relationship with the truth, as it makes pronouncements like: “Iran has continuously submitted to intrusive inspections, above and beyond what is required by Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). None of these inspections have found any proof that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program.” This, just as yet another group of inspectors have left Iran in huff, after being barred from entering those very facilities.

Addressing President Obama, Occupy AIPAC declares: “We call on you to use diplomacy — not crippling sanctions and threats of military intervention — to deal with Iran.”

One of the group’s leaders is activist Rae Abileah, who interrupted Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech in front of Congress last May. In an op-ed on Huffington Post, she promised that “activists will stage Occupy AIPAC – a counter-conference along with creative protests outside the AIPAC convention, in opposition to these policies. Millions of Americans hopeful of emerging from the recent recession must push back against another Middle East war promoted by many of the same people and organizations that brought us the catastrophic consequences of the war with Iraq.”

The implication here, of course, is that President Bush’s war on Iraq was launched under the influence of the pro-Israel lobby. And so, Israel’s existential crisis, borne by a nuclear threat, is presented as a callous manipulation of US foreign policy. And US dire security interests are nothing more than an economic burden.